'Intellifill IV' Uses Barcodes

According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academics, medication errors are the most common medical errors causing harm to at least 1.5 million people annually. Costs of these errors conservatively amounts to $3.5 billion a year.

The new Intellifill IV from ForHealth Technologies takes direct aim at the most common medical errors with its robotic drug dosage filling system.

-incomplete patient information (not knowing about patients’ allergies, other medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses, and lab results, for example);

-unavailable drug information (such as lack of up-to-date warnings);

-miscommunication of drug orders, which can involve poor handwriting, confusion between drugs with

-similar names, misuse of zeroes and decimal points, confusion of metric and other dosing units, and inappropriate abbreviations;

-lack of appropriate labeling as a drug is prepared and repackaged into smaller units; and

-environmental factors, such as lighting, heat, noise, and interruptions, that can distract health professionals from their medical tasks.

Alison Apple, the pharmacy administrator at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee says, "The IntelliFill i.v. robotic technology is simply amazing and ensures medication safety through the use of barcodes."

What’s even more amazing is that the Intellifill IV is a combination of time tested technologies combined in a unique and visionary way.